According to a report at Broadcasting & Cable, the tall foreheads at Saturday Night Live — including Canadian-born creator Lorne “Dr. Evil” Michaels — are in talks with NBC about setting up a standalone site for the show, one that would feature clips as well as out-takes, video of rehearsals and so on. This seems like such a no-brainer that it’s hard to understand why it hasn’t happened already. There are clips on Hulu (which I would embed here, if it weren’t for the fact that they aren’t available outside of the U.S.), but the show could be doing so much more with its content.

Apparently the audience that Tina Fey’s impersonation of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been drawing has caused more than a few jaws to drop at NBC. According to MediaPost, clips of Fey doing her thing have pulled in twice as many viewers as watched the originals on NBC, which according to a comment from TVbythenumbers at Silicon Alley Insider is almost unheard of. Obviously, those numbers are getting a boost from the election and the heightened awareness of the topic, but there’s also a feedback loop effect that SNL is benefiting from.

What if you could watch rehearsals for some of those SNL skits online — maybe through a special-access “backstage” pass for a small fee — and then see the finished product that same night? The show could even allow viewers to vote on the sketches they like (which could either lead to fewer stinkers or create more of them), or come up with other interactive features. Regardless, the ability to see more of the performers they like and the skits they want to watch would only deepen the relationship that fans have with the show, and would do so much better than Hulu can.

Update:

As it turns out, the guy in charge of the SNL standalone site is none other than man-about-town Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz. Does that explain girlfriend (and Huffington Post blogger) Rachel Sklar’s SNL obsession, or are the two unrelated? Inquiring minds want to know.

One of the highlights of last weekend’s Saturday Night Live episode — apart from the brilliant (as always) Sarah Palin impersonation by Tina Fey — was a clip in which George Bush, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank talk about the Wall Street bailout and who is to blame, and then a succession of pathetic characters tell their stories. I recall seeing a Twitter message (I think it was from Mark Hopkins of Mashable) on Monday about how the clip was nowhere to be found. I didn’t think that much of it, because I assumed NBC had pulled it from YouTube for the usual reasons.

As it turns out, however, NBC pulled the video for legal reasons — in a nutshell, I think, it was afraid it was going to get sued. Although there have been a number of dark whispers from right-wing types such as Michelle Malkin about how the skit was yanked because it criticized Democrats like Pelosi and Frank (as well as equally dark whispers about how it was pulled because it criticized billionaire George Soros), according to NBC the skit was removed and re-edited because it “didn’t meet quality standards.” A website has since appeared that has the original clip, as well as a number of news stories and blog posts about it (it has a .cx domain name, which — in case you’re wondering — belongs to Christmas Island).

Regardless of all the conspiracy theories, it seems pretty obvious that the text that appeared on screen when characters representing Herb and Marion Sandler told their story (the super at the bottom said “People who should be shot”) was a big part of the problem, since it is missing from the re-edited version (which I have embedded to the right). So is the part where they thank Barney Frank for turning a blind eye to their “fraudulent activities.” That’s a fairly clear case of slander, since there hasn’t been any evidence of fraud involving the Sanders, who sold their Golden West Financial savings & loan business to Wachovia for $24-billion.

In retrospect, I guess it’s not surprising that NBC re-edited the clip. What I find fascinating is that there’s very little point in doing so, since the original and the story behind the removal are both so readily available.

In an interview with the New York Observer, Lorne Michaels — the creator of Saturday Night Live and proud product of The Great White North — says that as far as he’s concerned, YouTube is the best thing since TVs were invented (hat tip to Techdirt for the link).

“I think that YouTube is great, because if you do something like ‘Dick in a Box,’ someone in Pakistan can see it,” said Mr. Michaels in a phone interview.

And the money quotes:

“I think it’s simple for me,” said Mr. Michaels. “If the work is good, I want the most number of people to see it—period. Anything that leads to that would be my objective.”

“The creators obviously want the biggest possible audience,” added Mr. Michaels. “And lawyers have another agenda.”

Like a lot of TV networks, NBC was cruising along happily ignoring the Internet as much as possible, until the “Lazy Sunday” video clip from Saturday Night Live hit YouTube almost exactly a year ago and caused what I like to refer to as a “holy crap” moment in the executive suites of the broadcaster. More than five million people watched the clip in the space of about two weeks. So what did NBC do? Told the site to take it down. In other words, the stupid pills kicked in.

To someone’s credit, however, NBC rethought this move and started taking Internet distribution seriously, setting up a unit called NBBC (the National Broadband Broadcasting Co.) to seed the Web with NBC content. And that leads us directly to the latest viral video hit from SNL, the musical satire called “My Dick in a Box”, featuring Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg.

As the New York Times describes, NBC chose to put an uncensored version of the video on their site, and it is all over YouTube as well. I think it’s hilarious, and plenty of other people seem to think so too. The other skits with Justin Timberlake, including one where he plays a giant Cup o’ Soup street-corner vendor, are also worth watching, as is the segment with Jimmy Fallon called “The Barry Gibb Show.” All are available on the NBC site and elsewhere.

Like many people my age (don’t ask), I remember Saturday Night Live from way back — John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, etc. — and slightly less way back (Dana Carvey, Mike Myers), and I have periodically enjoyed newer versions of the show including such “stars” as Adam Sandler, Chris Farley and Ben Stiller. But like Ashkan Karbasfrooshan at WatchMojo, I have probably paid more attention to the show in the past year or so than I have in a decade, and that is almost single-handedly the result of Andy Samberg (and Chris Parnell, who got booted from the show in a recent purge).

Samberg, as the NYT story describes, came to SNL from a comedy troupe called Lonely Island, and brought with him several writers and producer types. Whether they have helped to boost NBC’s smarts when it comes to the Internet as well as making hilarious videos (the Natalie Portman one is also a keeper) is difficult to say, but I would argue that he has helped that network more than just about any senior executive you could name. He deserves a raise.